“Every aspect of our mission is being challenged.” Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN America, the literary and human rights organization, was speaking onstage at Cooper Union on Wednesday night. PEN’s annual general meeting featured a distinguished panel, moderated by Ms. Nossel, of five writers talking about the role of journalism and literature under the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

The conversation ranged over subjects from dissecting the American electorate to the outbreak of so-called fake news to the issue of free speech on college campuses. The panelists spoke for about 30 minutes before opening the floor to questions and comments from PEN members in attendance.

Mona Eltahawy, a contributor to The New York Times opinion pages and the author of “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution,” said: “I think it’s really important right now to not be polite.” True to her word, Ms. Eltahawy, who lives in Cairo and New York City, was eloquently impolite all night, especially when talk turned to the idea of what we owe those on the opposite side of political battles.

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s largely unpredicted election, there has been much hand-wringing in the media about doing a better job of understanding and empathizing with some of his voters.

“I can’t afford empathy,” Eltahawy said, “because I’m Egyptian. I’m Muslim. I’m a woman. I don’t have time to try to persuade or to negotiate for my humanity.” Of Trump voters and supporters, she said: “I owe them nothing. And I will not exhaust myself trying to persuade them.”

The novelist Daniel Alarcón, seated just next to Ms. Eltahawy onstage, said with sincerity: “I’m glad Mona brought her flamethrower.” But he went on to describe what he called the “valuable exercise” of attempting to see differing perspectives, difficult as that can be.

The novelist Dinaw Mengestu said, “I don’t think how you voted is the totality of who you are.”

Andrew Solomon, the author of “Far From the Tree” and other books, as well as the current president of PEN America, outlined two pragmatic objectives for the left — to win back those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then Mr. Trump in 2016, and to “energize the people who are on our side.”

He emphasized that the rhetoric for each of those tasks is not always the same, and that winning converts is a delicate mission. “Most people don’t tend to vote for you because you made them feel like they lost the argument,” he said, though he also noted that politics at this particular moment can feel “like something out of ‘Paradise Lost,’” in which some people on one side do seem to “represent evil.”

Mr. Solomon argued that individual stories are better than statistics about injustice and inequality in getting people to change their perspectives. Ms. Eltahawy responded: “I’m becoming the resident angry person on this panel, and I’m glad to play that role.” She said focus on individual stories often means identifying a “good Muslim” as someone with an extraordinary back story that permits them to then be granted their humanity.

Masha Gessen, the Russian-American author of several books and a contributor to The New York Times opinion pages, spoke of “a full-out attack on the public sphere” that “constantly puts us in a position where facts are a matter for debate.”

Though she has often written about Russia, she called obsession with that country’s role in the 2016 election as a distraction from what is happening “out in the open to democratic institutions in this country.”

Ms. Gessen got a big laugh when she described some of the reaction to Mr. Trump’s address to Congress on Feb. 28. “Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that he could read,” she said. She expressed particular disappointment in the CNN commentator Van Jones, and his comments that Mr. Trump was “presidential” that night, especially when he acknowledged the widow of a member of the Navy SEALs. Ms. Gessen said Mr. Jones’s reaction was just one example of “how difficult it is . . . to produce more and more articulated outrage.”

Ms. Eltahawy expressed exasperation at the end over the number of people during the event, most of them white, who made claims of exhaustion and asked the panelists for advice on how to keep up unflagging opposition. Ms. Eltahawy suggested in the firm tone that she used all night that those people realize how privileged they have been to have not felt besieged by politics before now. She left them with two words of advice: “Fight harder.”